DC Dana Blog: Making people feel better about their lives by comparison since 2011(Struggling to post regularly lately, but feel free to read all my past content in the Archives. There, you'll find the embarrassing, ridiculous details of my dating, travel, work, and running adventures.)

This past weekend held more holiday parties, one of which I sort of accidentally crashed last year:

"The Best Christmas Party Ever"

(That's actually the title. They go big.)

This party is thrown by some people who attend my church and they typically have 300+ guests and rent out a Civil War Naval Hospital as the venue.

Only in D.C.

Last year, this event showed up on my Facebook somehow but I couldn't tell how I got invited. So I asked two of my other friends who might know the hosts and they said they saw it too. So we decided to go.

We get ourselves together, head to the party, and realize -there is a line to get in. Are we at a Christmas party, or a Jay Z concert?

So we stand there, freezing, chatting away, eyeing the tray of cupcakes our friend C is holding as our gift offering for the hosts, and we start to hear murmurings through the crowd that they may not even be letting people in anymore.

Then we move up closer to the door where a guy is checking names. And we start to confirm with each other:

"Did one of you send me the invite to this?"
"Not me, I don't actually know who sent me the invite..."
"I didn't recognize any of the hosts..."
"I wasn't on the invite, someone just told me about it...."

This is not good.

Finally it's our turn to stand before the gate keeper and he literally says - in our faces - something about how they are at capacity and how annoying it is that people kept passing out invitations for this thing.

Heh...heh.... yeah...some people...

We shuffle around uncomfortably and C grips those cupcakes as justification for our presence like she's Baby from Dirty Dancing:

I Carried A Watermelon.

We finally gain entrance.

Phew! We won't freeze to death on the steps of hospital - hooray!

We enter a world completely packed wall to wall with humans in cocktail attire, military dress uniforms, and festive props.

This party is intense. But the rest of the evening is your typical fun night of meeting new people, photo booth picture taking, and dancing our shoes off. Literally.

And it's all fairly uneventful until right before we leave.

We are standing in one of the many rooms when a guy comes around with a big tray of desserts. And we dive in, still laughing about the fact that we probably don't really belong here, and we learn that:

he's one of the hosts.

In fact, I think he might've been the same guy who was checking names off grumpily at the door earlier.

And he loves us.

We charm him for several minutes until he finally asks "who invited you guys? I need to thank them!"

Ha! We've come full circle from this guy nearly keeping us out, to him giving thanks we got in. (To this day, I still don't fully know who actually did invite us all.)

This year, we actually had legitimate invites -- mostly because I just went to Iraq with one of the hosts (the things you have to do to get into this party...)

There were no real shenanigans to report this year, though I'll leave you with some of our photo booth shots to enjoy. [A. I definitely grabbed a sign off the table that inexplicably just said "Birthday Boy -->" which I of course held over a girl's head because why is there a sign for that? (it reminded me of the one time I actually attended a WWE event and instead of watching the wrestlers, I was fascinated by the crowd filled with signs that made no sense or had anything to do with wrestling, like "Ceiling- UP" or "I farted"...) B. We definitely photobombed another group and they won't realize that until the pictures come back. Which probably means we'll be back off the list for this party again next year...]